Ruth Ozeki is an award-winning novelist, film-maker and Zen Buddhist priest, author of My Year of Meats and All Over Creation. In her new novel, A Tale for the Time Being – her first for 10 years – a teenage girl's diary, sealed inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox, is washed away from Japan by a tsunami and discovered by an author, Ruth, in British Columbia. Ozeki spins an enchanting tale about the struggle of the outsider caught between cultures, personal and global catastrophe, and the power of reading and writing.

Is A Tale for the Time Being a response to the Japanese tsunami of 2011?

I started writing this book in 2006, five years before the tsunami. The heroine, Nao, knew that she was writing for a reader but didn't know who that reader was, and neither did I – so I wrote the book four or five times with different readers in mind. I reached a point where I thought I couldn't get any further and submitted it to my editor thinking she could help me. That's when the tsunami hit. So I withdrew it and rewrote it. That time it worked.

How much of the character Ruth is you?

Some of it, but only a small facet. Ruth is a sort of avatar, which allowed me to respond to events in both a serious and playful way. Like 9/11, the tsunami was a deeply disturbing event – I started thinking about things such as the ephemeral nature of being. When you see buildings collapse like that it shakes your entire notion of what time and space are.

Nao's diary is described as a "message in a bottle". Is the fictional author Ruth's discovery of the diary a metaphor for how a story is born?

That's exactly right. As a writer you wait around for inspiration; this book is about what happens when a character taps a writer on the shoulder and calls her into being; it's about the character creating a novelist.

Where do your ideas come from?

My mind is like a gyre and odd juxtapositions happen. My husband sent me an article from the New Yorker about quantum computing, which is why that subject crops up in the book – actually, most of my ideas come from articles that my husband sends me.

Time is a powerful theme in the book. Nao hides her diary within Proust's In Search of Lost Time…

I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly. In particular, the book emerged over the period of time when I was taking care of my elderly parents. I was spending a lot of time trying to understand what my relationship had been with them, and remembering. At the same time I was doing a lot of Zen practice and study. All of these elements came together.

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

Ever since I was little. For me, writing is a way of thinking. I write in a journal a lot. I'm a very impatient person, so writing and meditation allow me to slow down and watch my mind; they are containers that keep me in place, hold me still. Language is something that's been passed down throughout human history. I love the Japanese notion of "kotodama" – the spirits in words. I think that's a beautiful concept.

The outsider is a key figure in your novels. Nao (who has moved from America to Japan) is bullied at school. Where does your interest in outsiders come from?

I lived most of my life feeling like an outsider. I remember in second grade being bullied, taunted and beaten up. I am bicultural, biracial – my mother is Japanese and my father is caucasian. I grew up in Connecticut; it was a fairly white culture and I grew up thinking I was Japanese. Then when I went to Japan I realised that I was American. That was shocking but also a wonderful completion, realising that I was neither here nor there but occupied some liminal space, neither in one culture or the other. That's a great vantage point.